For `Boom Box Mama,' Love Of Life Was Always No. 1

Extraordinary Life

Each Sunday, ``Extraordinary Life'' looks back on someone who died in the past month whose life made a difference. Kathleen ``Kathy'' McCarthy Clark, 62, of Willimantic, died Oct. 6.

The line in Kathleen Clark's obituary, the one that says she fought an outrageous battle with cancer, is not a mistake.

``She was angry -- no, pissed off -- about dying,'' said her daughter Annie Clark. She hated what the cancer was doing to her body. She wanted to spend more time with her six children and her grandchildren. Five years earlier, a granddaughter had finally been born into the large Clark clan. She wanted to lead a couple of more Boom Box parades in Willimantic and sing some more Irish ballads with friends in local pubs.

``She wanted to live,'' Annie Clark said.

And so, she decided to write her own obituary and do what she had always done in life -- tell it like it is.

``When I met Kathy, I was a single mother trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life,'' said Mary Webb, who is one test away from being a social worker. ``But Kathy wasn't about to let me feel sorry for myself. She helped me see what I needed to do to succeed, and the rest was up to me.''

``You never wondered where you stood with Kathy,'' her friend Peg Kozin said. ``She stood up for what she believed in, and she made no apologies for it.''

And more than anything, Kathleen Clark believed in living life to the fullest. Her daughter recalled her mother's helping her sister-in-law with cancer and saying, ``If this is what it's like to fight a courageous battle, I want nothing to do with it,'' her daughter said.

Of course, courage was instinctively part of Clark. How else to explain the time she and her husband, Owen ``Tony'' Clark, to whom she was married for 44 years, decided on a whim to move to Australia when their oldest was just in kindergarten.

``It was quite an adventure,'' Annie Clark said. ``It was completely `Little House on the Prairie.''' That adventure ended a year later, when Clark became pregnant. But it certainly didn't mark the end of Clark's enterprising spirit.

When the family moved to Florida, she and her husband, a postal worker, became involved in local union issues. Among the rights they fought for was allowing postal workers to grow facial hair and wear shorts in the oppressive heat. They won, and while Tony Clark went about growing a beard, Kathy went about turning some of his pants into shorts.

It was a while before the uniform company would have the shorts ready. ``But the first day those shorts were allowed, my Dad was wearing them,'' Annie Clark said.

When they moved to Willimantic, Clark wasted no time becoming involved in the community. Besides her job as Section 8 coordinator for the public housing department and her local activist work, she was best known as the founder of the annual Boom Box Parade.

Not about to see the Fourth of July parade end in 1986 because there was no music (the Windham High School band had disbanded), Clark approached local radio station WILI-AM with a tape and proposition: Play marching-band music over the air, and people would carry boom boxes in the parade. She was convinced that people would participate in such a parade. Of course, no one had any reason to believe that, and when Wayne Nelson, radio host, drove by the formation area a couple of hours before the parade was to start, it was empty.

But Clark had faith, and the inaugural parade was a hit.

``It received worldwide press because an Associated Press writer got wind of it. I got feedback from all over the country, heard from a local soldier stationed in Korea and saw [myself] quoted in Spanish in a Guatemalan newspaper,'' Nelson said.

``It was so American. It was so Kathy. She had faith in people, and her faith in people paid off,'' said her friend Jean de Smet.

Kathleen Clark will long be remembered as the ``Boom Box Mama,'' friends said. The parade continues as an annual event, but that is just one of the many legacies she left behind.

``Her love was something that you never questioned,'' her friend Kozin said. ``When she told you she loved you, you believed it. You felt it. And in return, she was most definitely loved back.''